Monday, December 18, 2017

Prairie Fever (RHI Entertainment, 2008)

Kevin is a homesman

One is tempted to be rather dismissive
of Hallmark-style TV Western movies or low-budget straight-to-video oaters, and
yes, they can be on the bland side and not terribly authentic. But to be fair,
some are quite presentable and a few are even downright good. Certainly many
are no worse than the old B-Westerns we used to see in movie theaters back in
the day, and, just occasionally, one rises above the moderate standard.

Kevin Sorbo, Hercules no less, has only
appeared in four Westerns (so far) but they haven’t been at all bad. He first
starred in Avenging Angel in 2007 (not that hot),
did Prairie Fever in ’08, was in Shadow on the Mesain 2013 (quite good) and played a (rather unconvincing)
81-year-old Jesse James in Jesse James: Lawman in 2015. All of these are at least watchable. Mr. Sorbo has a
quiet-but-tough mien which suits the Western.

Hercules goes West

In Prairie
Fever he plays Preston Biggs, a washed-up lawman who has become a drunk
after, oops, accidentally shooting his own wife in a bank hold-up in his town,
Clearwater (a name beloved by Western writers). Now he just observes crime in
the saloon, through a whiskey glass. Two thugs he had sent to the pen when he
was sheriff come in looking for revenge now they are out, a fight ensues and Biggs
beats them but lands up in jail, unable to pay any fine.

He is given an out, though. He agrees to
take some mail-order brides who have “the prairie fever” by wagon to
the take the train in Carson City (we know there’s a railroad there because
Randolph Scott built it in 1952). "Prairie fever" is a euphemism for their having become mentally unbalanced because of the brutal lifestyle on the frontier. This notion of deranged women being taken ‘home’ –
back East – was of course finely treated in Glendon Swarthout’s superb novel The Homesman in 1988, and a quality
movie, also entitled The Homesman, was made of it with Tommy Lee Jones in 2014. I don’t know if the directors
of Prairie Fever (Stephen Bridgewater
and David S Cass Sr.) or the writer (Steven H Berman) had read this book, but
there are certainly similarities.

Frontier life was undoubtedly extremely
harsh for farming women in the late-nineteenth-century West and many cracked
under the strain, physically or mentally. There were asylums, often in cities
like St Louis, where those who had lost their minds were incarcerated. The
whole notion of ‘mail-order brides’ seems obnoxious to us now but was common
then. Men vastly outnumbered women as a proportion of the West’s population. The
splendid film Westward the Women treated
that theme with compassion and sensitivity. So many of the wives had no idea at
all of what was in store for them out West and when they got there, many were
treated practically as unpaid servants and worked beyond their capabilities. It
is an unlovely story.

Various threats are added to the mix in Prairie Fever to make the trek more
dangerous. Those two thugs turn up again, the ones that Biggs had bested in the
saloon, and then there is the deadly gambler Monte James, whom card-sharping
partner Olivia, abused by him (it’s a sort of Doc Holliday/Big-Nose Kate
relationship) has trussed up before skedaddling, taking her share of their
ill-gotten gains. He follows, bent on vengeance, and when Olivia joins Biggs’s
party (luckily she has a soothing effect on the mad women) Monte becomes a real
danger.

Lance in his best role

Now he puts Kevin in the same situation as before: will the hero react the same way?

Gambler Monte is played by the excellent Lance Henriksen, unforgettable
as the cannibal gunman in Dead Man, who
also appears (less memorably though) in The Quick and the Dead and Appaloosa
(he is Ring Shelton in the latter). Sadly, however, he is written out for all
the middle part of the movie, only re-appearing once they get to Carson, and
even then kind of fading away before any proper showdown. Olivia is played by Jamie
Anne Allman, more recently of The Killing,
and she wears a man’s suit (stolen from Monte, I think) and is generally
dominant and feisty in a 21st century way. Her skills with a rifle come in
handy and she bosses Kevin about until finally it's lerve.

It's lerve

There are also two brothers, one of
whom, Frank (Silas Weir Mitchell) has given over his crazed spouse to homesman
Biggs. She has become a religious maniac, spouting endless scripture, enough to
drive even the sane members of the party to the brink. Frank’s brother Charlie
(Blake Gibbons) wants back the money that Frank had given Biggs for the
transaction. It turns out that Charlie had forced himself on her; that was
what drove her mad, and Leviticus 20:21 is her favorite text. This part is all
a bit on the improbable side, it must be said - I mean the brothers pursuing, not the thou shalt not/brother's wife bit. But anyway there are quite a few
menaces to the party of women + Biggs to be dealt with, one way and another.

The mad women are played by Felicia Day
as the bible-quoting gabbler, Dominique Swain as the artistic Abigail and Jillian
Armenante as the musical Lettie. All are gradually calmed by the kindness and
care of Olivia and Biggs. Ms. Day is very beautiful; I’ve
seen her before somewhere but can’t think where. I don’t know Ms. Swain, who
has rather modern Californian diction. Ms. Armenante bears a remarkable
resemblance to William Bendix, which is nice.

One fault the movie has, in common with
all these recent TV ones, is that all the actors are clearly wearing costumes. This
is one noticeable difference with Westerns of the twentieth century. The
characters can’t carry off their Western garb; they just don’t look natural in
it at all.

It all ends rather too neatly as the
women regain their sanity, Biggs stops drinking, the badmen are killed (except Monte
James who drives off for Kansas City leaving Olivia in the arms of the now sober
Biggs with her share of the money) and they all lived happily ever after.
Spoiler alert, oops, too late.

2 comments:

If you like Lance Henriksen, you’d enjoy ‘Gunfighter’s Moon,’ from 1995. Unfortunately, DVD copies are scarce and cost a small fortune. And the transfer on YouTube is a poor one. Quite a decent little movie, though, and Lance looks right at home in a western.